Reading for the citizens of the future : An analysis of three political discussions about children´s and young people´s reading in the 1910s, 1950s and the 2010s

The purpose of this thesis is to explore how politic in the field of children´s and young people´s reading has been formulated and motivated during different periods. The analysis comprises political discussions from three periods: the 1910s discussion about how to promote good and inexpensive reading for pleasure, the 1950s political debate about light entertaining literature and comic books, and the political discussion about decreasing reading ability and reading promotion that followed the impaired Swedish results from PISA 2012. The overall issue for the thesis is how the view of children’s reading and children as readers that is expressed in the political discussions differs from each other, as well as how those differences could be explained in relation to the social and cultural policy context. The method is comparative history analysis. The resource material consists of documents from the Swedish Parliament and government official reports. A theoretical point of departure is the childhood studies research and the concept of children as beings or becomings. The analysis also uses theories about literary value and ideas about the function of reading. One of the findings is that children’s reading during all three periods is of great importance, for the children themselves as well as for the future of society. There are also differences. Over time, the discussion has moved from the question of a material lack of good books to a worry about inability and lack of interest in reading. While the 1910s and the 1950s discussions are about “good” and “bad” or “harmful” literature, the 2010s discussion pay more attention to reading as an activity and view reading in all its aspects as truly positive. It is also possible to see a shift in the debate from a collectivistic focus on public education and the citizen’s cultural progress, to a more individualistic approach that emphasizes participation and different ways to acquire literature. This is a two years master’s thesis in Library and Information Science